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Further to what I posted last week about the idea of using twitter as a means of social learning; that is recording notes, seeing other peoples’ perspectives and creating discussion, my project supervisor introduced me to Storfiy.com, which can take all the tweets of a given hash tag and put them into chronoligical order. I tried it in said supervisors science of education lecture, and this was the output.

I just did a quick literature search on Google scholar for the word ‘twitter’. It seem that this medium is a relatively unexplored area in the realms of psychology. Tap in ‘twitter education’ and you get plenty about education, but nothing about twitter. One researcher has worked out that twitter gives foreign people an opportunity to practise genuine English conversation, but that was about as interesting as it got.

My project supervisor has mentioned once or twice the idea that an entire lecture slide could be fit into one tweet. The field of cognitive psychology teaches us that the semantic (meaning based) level of learning is by far the best way to learn something, if you actually want to remember it, and so the process of analysis and condensing that information down into such a small string will surely help somebody.

But we don’t merely learn from the type of rehearsal that is merely the robotic re-reading or repetition of someone else’s notes. In short, the person who should be tweeting, is YOU!

Picture a lecture where parallel to the slides (or better still, instead of the slides) is a tweet board. Student’s are invited to bring their iPads, Androids or Windowses and tweet back their semantic interpretation of what is being taught. Picture a lecture who examines the tweets during the break, and uses them to stimulate a discussion during the second half of the lecture.

Picture a class being given a hash tag on the morning of the exam, where they can tweet to each other their revision, so they are effectively teaching one another the content, and comparing their understanding with one another. Picture them asking their questions, and answering each others questions, literally quizzing each other.

The equipment is set up now, the costs for such a thing are nothing. I’m not a teacher yet, but I would be very excited to see this in motion one day.

Have a read of the link below too, I read this a few years back and thought nothing of it. But it is an example of it already having been done during a Latter-day Saint general conference a few years back.